It's #NationalDonutDay so I made Faux Cronuts
If you've been on-line @ ANY food type site in the last few weeks, you've undoubtedly heard of the Cronut. This mythical croissant/donut hybrid has taken the food media hostage and even seeped into the realm of the mainstream (assuming you think Kathie Lee, Hoda & the New York Times are mainstream). The thing is, the Cronut is less than 1 month old and the lone bakery to make the trademarked item only produces 200/day, so there have only been 3-4 thousand ever made. Which means, as I type this, more people will sprain their ankle in the next 6 hours, than have even had a taste of a cronut. Ever.
Which leads me to my Donut Day baking project that doesn't really involve baking: The Pillsbury Crescent Roll Cronut Hack. See, I have no plans in the immediate future to fly to NY, head out to SoHo @ 6AM and wait in line for 2-3 hours just to have a CHANCE of getting a Cronut. Seems mighty cost & time inefficient to me. What IS time & cost efficient is letting General Mills do the heavy lifting for me as they attempt to capitalize on the Cronut Craze.
Pictures to follow, but allow me to jump ahead in time - this thing that has ABSOLUTELY no right to be good, is really, really good! Ugly? Kinda. Calorie Bomb devoid of any nutritional value? For sure. It's even a little labor intensive for a mere 3 Faux Cronuts. But since getting an actual Cronut is nigh impossible until Dominique Ansel sells out (and he's made it abundantly clear that's not happening), this is what we've got to work with. And it's worth the effort.
The Pillsbury Cronut Hack:
You can find the hack @ the Pillsbury site under the title "Salted Caramel Crescent Doughnuts", but make no mistake, it's a faker cronut. There's a reason they paid Serious Eats to slap the recipe up on their main page today. Here's what their professionally photoshopped/food-styled end product looked like:
So I gather my ingredients, but I REFUSE to use "1 snack-size container (4 oz) vanilla pudding" as the filling. Eff that noise! Yes, I'm willing to give a chance to crescent roll "dough" in a cardboard tube I bought from Target, but I draw the line at pudding cups. I'm perfectly capable of making Pasty Cream, thank you very much:
So, off camera, I make some Pastry Cream & Caramel Sauce using Ruhlman's recipes from Ratio. If you don't have that book, get it. Awesome guide to nearly anything worth eating, but I digress. I have The Hottie open the cardboard tube 'cause, frankly, I have no prior experience in extracting mass-produced "dough" from vacuum-sealed, recyclable tubes. It's not exciting:
Then you stack the dough rectangles:
Fold the rectangles over (so 4 layers a pop) and cut them with a biscuit cutter:
The leftover bits get re-rolled (even though you haven't rolled jack at this point) to make the 3rd one. It's definitely the ugly-duckling of the batch. Also, The Hottie thought it'd be cute to use this teeny-tiny clover...thing to stamp out the holes. My mom had a whole set (ace, clubs, diamonds & spades) that would make the tiniest tea sandwiches in the history of tea sandwiches. People must have starved back then or something:
With the dough looking like donuts, it's time for frying. I test the holes out first and they don't look half bad!:
Time for the real deal and, after a couple minutes on each side, they do indeed look like extra-puffy donuts. Even the Frankensteined third one looks pretty good:
I let them drain on the paper-toweled rack made of wire and they look good. Unless you told somebody you used mass-produced dough, I doubt they could tell at this point. And, yes, a cronut hole is missing 'cause I ate it. Sue me. It was REALLY good hot out of the fryer. I'm reasonably sure that deep fried crescent rolls would be a big, savory hit at tables across this great deep-fried nation of ours:
Once cooled, it's just a matter of carefully slicing the cronuts in half, filling them with the pastry cream, caramel sauce & a sprinkle of Maldon salt:
Then it's back to the rack made of wire for some icing that I, admittedly, made w-a-y too thin. Tasted fine, but made it far uglier than it should have been. Those Pillsbury food stylists won't be knocking on my door anytime soon:
Drizzle more caramel and salt on the cronuts and you're done! Do they look like the very pic @ the Pillsbury site? Hell no! Then again, does a Big Mac look like a Big Mac IRL? Or the recipes in Saveur? Those pics are beyond Photoshopped! But, IDC 'cause they taste soooooooooooooo good!
So, I was doing all this fully prepared to be snarky & write about the fail of the cronut hack and it ended up well worth doing (and repeating). Honestly, the cronuts & their holes didn't last more than ten minutes even if it was prolly my caloric intake for the day. If you're on the fence about this project, I urge you to give it a shot! Does it taste like a real cronut? Who knows? I'll likely sprain both ankles & get hit by lightning before I ever taste an authentic, trademarked cronut. But, hack or not, the Salted Caramel Crescent Donut stands on it's own.
- A16 
- Aubergine